Day: December 8, 2014

Yoshka’s

A Cafe at Googleplex named after their excecutive, Urs Hölzle’s dog, “Yoshka”, Google’s “first dog”. I thought it was “Yoshika” which would be a Japanese name and thus a Japanese restaurant – how wrong I was! Not much better than the Q&A session that followed:

Q. So who founded Google?

Many hands shoot up in enthusiasm. Bright eyed, they begged to be called on since, of course, they’ve got the right answer.

A. Steve Jobs!

Shouted a 12 year old with exuberant confidence of a …twelve-year old.

Q. Another try? Anyone?

Now Fewer hands go up.

A. Bill Gates !

NO ~ C’mon ! A crowd of middle school students bursts into laughter …some rolling on the lawn picnic style as we watch google employees on bicycles and pedal motored cycles with several aboard where apparently they hold staff meetings (as they pedal:)… it does resemble campuses of higher learning as the founders envisioned their corporate headquarter to look and feel like. Indeed, its a “campus”!

Q. Anyone?

Still fewer hands go up…

Okay so, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the founders of Google. Urs Holzle was their 8th employee. Fascinating history of a very young company that changed the world. Interesting how we use google everyday but little do we know about this company. At least I didn’t until this visit.

An escalator where a rainbow colored staircase keeps moving with names and words… representing the MOST SEARCHED words and names on google the last month…

Embarrassed to admit I was most impressed with the fact that they have 35 cafes on their “campus” to service the 35,000 Silicon Valley employees out of 50,000 worldwide employees. Woof, woof !